You Carry The Heavy Stuff

Esther Bradley-DeTallyFeaturing Esther Bradley-DeTally

TW:  Good morning Esther, so good to see you and be able to chat about your new book “You Carry the Heavy Stuff”.  We are so glad you are here to give inspiration to our readers and to tell us of your journey as a writer.

Esther:  Thank you.  I think of myself as Sorry Gnat, World Citizen, and Resource Yenta for relationships, jobs, rent on the planet Haiku, book suggestions, writing groups, people of note, guide to spiritual and Bahá'í writings and happenings.

TW:  When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?

Esther:  My first writing assignment was in the second grade and I wrote about my mother and what a wonderful designer she was.  I’m sure I didn’t use the word “designer,” but as I described this large yellow chair trimmed in a bright one inch green fringe, my heart could barely contain my joy and pride for this mom who had so much talent.

TW:  Did you know then that was what you wanted to be?

Esther:  I think it was always there, but you know life swept by and in my early 40’s I went back to college as a junior, having whispered at the Bahá'í Shrines in Haifa “If I have any writing ability, please show me the way.”  Doors opened and this particular university had a writing program an MFA, and as a result, talented writing teachers gave off fragments of knowledge to undergraduates.  Oakley Hall, of Squaw Valley fame, and his books on writing and his westerns,  was my first writing teacher; he was one of the two people who headed the University of Irvine, MFA program, a program where hundreds applied each year and six writers were accepted in poetry and six were accepted into the prose writing.  Oakley said to me one day, “Just write your  77,000 words and don’t worry about it.”  So, that’s about it, that’s how I started. “Oakley showed us how to write with the camera eye, how to show and not tell our stories.  Other teachers followed.  I studied how to teach writing the “natural way” and over these last twenty years have taken workshops from those I would call “the greats” and chief among them was Jack Grapes in Los Angeles, the daddy of aspiring writers.” “I found out I was not a novelist, even though I read voraciously, fiction and nonfiction.  I was a short, dash the words out on the paper, type of gal, and you could almost feel a quick ending and know that the writer (me) was off jawing over coffee about something.”

TW:  It’s good to know, isn’t it, how we perceive ourselves and learn who we really are.  Writing is such a personal thing.  Do you find it difficult to put yourself out there and take a chance that your work will be criticized or someone will steam roll over you? 

Jack GrapesEsther: Yes, both in writing and in life.  It can be hard and I have many a year been devastated and stopped writing.  But sooner or later I gravitate towards writing again, and as I evolve, I am less sensitive to criticism.  In our society, particularly the United States, we can be exceedingly self-disclosing, and I feel I have to be careful because I write to a global audience.  On the other hand, we must risk and show our authentic selves, and imperfections or perfections, our striving.  Some people will say about the personal memoir, “What’s the point,” and I understand that, whilst others, myself included, will find the courage, humor, voice, whatever of the person who writes the memoir spurs us on.  It’s the story really. Finally, well not finally, if you had ten years, we could chat more, but one more note, I see things sideways, and I see things in image and moment, and I see patterns in behavior and courage amongst the anonymous amongst us.  I write to connect, in this vastly interconnected universe of ours.  However, I don’t have readership on Mars or whoever, not yet (smile).

TW: Any writing advice?

Esther:  The point is to write.  Copy other writers.  Journal every day.  Write in first person at first.  I would recommend that your readers check out Natalie Golberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” and Carolyn See’s book on writing and anything by Kurt Vonnegut had to say and there are a plethora of others.  Little by little, day by day, you will see the writer in you evolve and you will come into your own voice.  Who do you read?  Maybe that’s what you should write.

TW:  That’s good information for our readers and fledgling writers to consider.

Esther:  I don’t think of myself as a writer, shades of sitting up straight after I look in the mirror, shades of having to sit down and write an opus, or produce a Pulitzer Prize book.  I sit down and break it down, and just write.  Most times now it comes easily.  Of late, poetry rolls out of me.  But this would not be if I hadn’t been writing for over 25 years.

Esther with her husband Bill DeTallyIt took me years to call myself a writer.  I would go into libraries and think “How dare I add my voice,” but you know it’s little by little.  I tend to take fledgling out of describing writers.  When I teach writing,  which I often do as a service to those who have struggle with the price of lettuce, I say, “You are a writer.”  I think in this era, the exaltation of writer, the word piped or puffed out surrounded by clouds and heavenly music must go.  We are all creative in our own way, and my writer part within me is large, but I am more than that.  I am Esther, Bahá'í, lover of the light, the crooked smile, a good cookie, my husband, Bill and particularly good friends, jawing over coffee and solving the problems of the world for the next hour.  Writing leads you to glorious places, but sometimes your psyche plunges into darkness as if you were on a cheap freight elevator and the cord was cut.  It’s all a process.

“Like now when the dishes sit orphaned in the kitchen sink because I, their washer, am out clicking away at my keyboard, typing, sharing, breathing, living, putting off the inevitable.  Because once a long time ago, I was so hurt, I couldn't breathe.  I carried an intake of hurt with me forever, until I found out that sensitivity is the price and the prize in order to become a hollow reed for others.  I write for myself.  I write for others.  I write to others.  I write to a woman in Chowchilla, falsely imprisoned for defending herself against her rapist and abusive stepfather.  She tells me she liked the phrase in an essay of mine, "The language of God is a tear running down someone's cheek."

La Pintoresca LibraryI write because I read insatiably, gobbling, inhaling, filling myself with the human condition.  Some days, I am splat on the floor like a big old squished bug, its body swept up by old straws on a broom. Other days, I write to show my younger view of the magic of St. Theresa's Snow Queen Altar when I was seven, when everything looked like a wedding cake.

When I was younger, I was terrifically needy.  I could have impaled myself on a stake wide and big, sort of like a meta-letter holder, and I could have run this huge pole right through my insatiable heart, with a note on my back, "Loves too much." I write because I have gone beyond Medieval Posts puncturing despair and loneliness and have decided maybe men love too much also. We all love too much, and I write because maybe none of us love too much. 

We are told by images in advertising that we should be thin, jaded, look like models for glossy fashion magazines, whose eyes suggest an ability to shoot up on a lunch hour.  Despair is trendy.  Nihilism and materialism and not giving a damn might be the language of the hour. But out in the world of readers and would-be writers, and writers, some lonely, little, big, young, old, trembling, brassy, you catch-my-drift writer, writes because he or she must.  Words have a visceral effect upon her, him, the dog, the surrounding room, hopes for the world, and maybe a good ham sandwich (or description thereof) on a sour dough roll, with slabs of mayo, and a bed of lettuce. 

You know, what this nation needs is a good ham sandwich and a Pepsi without the Aspartame and some honest-to-goodness dealing with truth.  Hey maybe it’s okay to love and not love, to fear and not fear.  Let’s be real, be afraid of bugs in knotty pine walls when the walls come alive at night. 

At this moment, I watch an elderly blind woman clutch the corners of her walker, take a breath and remain a sweet, sweet spirit.  She thinks her tests are of the divinely calibrated kind, even though metaphoric trucks have run over her.  I write to honor her, to speak of the anonymous amongst us.  I love to watch bravery in action and small acts of courage, and what about kindness in our nation while the world is narcissistically checking its derriere in the mirror?  Does anyone listen to the intake of breath at midnight as the poor contemplate a way out?  I write to speak and suggest we must have immense courage and speak up.  We gotta talk, yeah, walk the talk, and we must share our hopes for a future where humankind will live in harmony and prosperity. 

I suggest someday we will all be sensitive, spiritually inclined, and aware of our oneness.  The sense of “the other” will go on a back shelf like Twinkies, no longer approved of by the American Heart Association.  Maybe writing will be celebrated by hoots and hollers and a piping or two from a medieval horn or Siberian throat.  I hope the arts will have a way of grabbing our souls’ innards and carrying us through the day. These are some of the reasons I write, but there are others.  Today is Wednesday, and these are my Wednesday writing reasons.”

See you around the bend and remember, just encourage others, and keep on truck’in, oh I meant, “Keep on writing.”

TW:  Thank you  Esther, it’s been absolutely delightful to chat with you.

Dear Readers, the following is an excerpt from Esther Bradley-DeTally’s forthcoming book “You Carry the Heavy Stuff”  “Why I Write, July, 2007…

Children of the Stolen Ones

What if, instead of calling the dark ones, the Negroes, the People of Color, names given by  history book scribes, say, “Black or African-Americans?” Then a phrase measured out, by Gloria, entered our gathering, all the while she was telling of a story of friends who called themselves The Sisters.  These Sisters went to South Africa, honoring their roots, and seeking answers to their identities.  On the trip they were constantly greeted by groups of women who would sing to them.  One day they met some African women who had the “Who are You? Where are you from look in their eyes, all the while staring at the Sisters.  One of the South African women said, “They are Children of the Stolen Ones.” Back in Pasadena, sitting on the orange velvet couch, those small noble words, “The Stolen Ones” bombarded my heart as I felt my soul sink into a place of utter knowingness, of a reverence and majesty revealed.